How can I figure out what emails are to me and which arent

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#1

Hi,

Maybe this is a pref, maybe it’s not… I’ve participated in a few threads by now over the past few weeks, and people have replied to me. However, I have not received those replies via email except for one occasion when the reply included the string @duffy - I see no special headers or indicators in the message that are filterable in a mail client.

Is this by design? My current actual mailing list rules setup tags and prioritizes messages that are to or CC me. Now I know I am missing interactions if I dont log in here and check the discourse web UI - I’m really trying to avoid having yet another notification bucket to check.

TLDR; how can I filter incoming discourse mail so I can prioritize replies to my posts?

#2

Hmmm. On a mailing list, unless someone CCs you as well, there’s no indication in the headers or subject that the message is a reply to you specifically unless the mail client keeps track of message ids you’ve sent, which I don’t know of any that do. It’s just by convention in quoting in the message body. On a lot of mailing lists like Fedora devel list it’s common to reply to people without CC’ing them explicitly, so if you want to look for that you have to filter on message body contents.

From what I can see, Discourse is setting In-Reply-To: messages properly, so they should be threaded properly in your mail client if your mail client respects that. (I am a diehard mutt user, and it does.) But Discourse does know in a consistent way that someone replied directly to a specific message (whether by email or the web interface), and it seems like it could set headers based on that, or based on whether the email was sent because you are @-mentioned.

(Although: gmail doesn’t even let you set up filters based on arbitrary headers. Just… not an option. So for most email users, such a feature would be useless.)

#3

Thunderbird keeps track of the message ids. If I’ve replied to a thread it gets highlighted. I don’t know if it’s baked in or an add-on though.

The Discourse emails are threading (well, the ones I receive. Your reply, btw, I did not receive in email I can only read on the website.)

Isn’t there a google script thing that lets you filter gmail on arbitrary headers that the kernel folks use?